The conventional alarm clock brings to the attention a pre-determined point in time by means of an audible alarm, but it does not differentiate between the time before and after the sounding of the alarm in a way that children, who are unable to read the time displayed on a clock, can relate to. A cuckoo clock indicates certain times by visual signals, but these are transient. For a child unable to read a clock, the cuckoo signal would probably convey no useful information and, when the signal was not being produced the clock would certainly be wholly uninformative.